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Shrive is a Middle English verb that means to prescribe penance: it survives today in the name of Shrove Tuesday, the date in the Christian calendar on which believers look inward to identify the sins they need to drag into the sunlight via confession and penitential labour.

In James Watkins’s soul-scorching, relentlessly riveting new episode of Black Mirror, it’s also the name of a virus-scanning app that 19-year-old Kenny (Alex Lawther), a waiter at an upmarket burger joint, installs on his laptop after his younger sister (Maya Gerber) accidentally infects it with malware.

Except of course scanning for viruses isn’t the half of it. With his webcam covertly activated, poor Kenny finds himself being filmed in a compromising situation which involves opening his laptop, locking his bedroom door and dropping his trousers. (He’s 19 years old, so your imagination quickly fills in the rest.) Afterwards his phone pips. It’s an anonymous text message written all in capitals: WE SAW WHAT YOU DID.

Alex Lawther as KennyCredit:
Laurie Sparham/Netflix

Understandably, Kenny’s shaken, and his distress turns to terror when whoever’s texting him threatens to leak the video – again, in all-caps – unless he obeys a set of instructions, while his harasser tracks him via his phone’s GPS. (There’s something brilliantly, counterintuitively ominous about the amiable ‘woop’ noise that heralds the arrival of every new SMS.) Then the list of demands filters through – and while the early ones are hard to parse, their alarming ultimate purpose slowly but surely coheres. Kenny feels he can do nothing but comply. Early scenes of him at work, where he’s regarded fondly by his boss but bullied by his fellow teenage colleagues, give us an inkling of what he has to lose.

Watkins is the director of Eden Lake and the Daniel Radcliffe-led version of The Woman in Black, and has a proven track record in slowly escalating menace. But he outdoes himself here, immediately establishing a mood of barely suppressed panic, then tightening every screw and ratchet at his disposal until the tension threatens to tear your television in two. (The script was co-written by series creator Charlie Brooker and Will Bridges.) Watkins keeps his camera on its feet and hungry, circling his cast anxiously at moments of high tension, and tracking after Kenny in lightning-charged chase sequences as he hares across London on his bike from one errand to the next. (This is the first Black Mirror episode since the very first to take place in the recognisable present and depend only on technology that’s widely available today: perhaps that’s why it’s so scary.)

Along the way, Kenny interacts with other men being blackmailed over their online misconduct – and with admirable realism, they are all men, though Brooker and Bridges find a smart way to plausibly implicate a woman towards the end too. Foremost among them is Jerome Flynn’s embattled husband and father Hector, whose dirty online secret is having arranged to meet a prostitute in a business hotel, and whose Volvo estate later becomes a necessary upgrade from Kenny’s bicycle.

The deliciously horrible details of Flynn’s performance sell you on his character’s predicament in a snap: he’s a weak, fallible human being, but he’s also a common-or-garden nasty piece of work, and the various ways in which that nastiness seeps to the surface during his enforced teaming up with his young fellow blackmail victim makes for sickeningly absorbing drama.(There's a hysterically tense sequence in which the pair are momentarily waylaid by Natasha Little's chatty PTA mum, and have to improvise a cover story while their mobiles keep on balefully chirping away in the background.)

Lawther, who’s probably best known for playing the young Alan Turing/Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game, is positioned more straightforwardly as the object of our sympathy, though that’s not to say the role is without its challenges, which the young actor rises to with understated shrewdness and style.

It’s worth clarifying that Shut Up and Dance is, by some distance, the most nihilistic episode of Black Mirror so far, with no space for comfort and an acrid aftertaste that doesn’t easily shift; that its denouement unfolds to Radiohead’s Exit Music (For a Film) should give you some idea of the concluding mood. Its vision of humanity – as creatures who’ll stake their lasting happiness on a squalid, lizard-brain-twitching thrill – is clear-eyed and uncompromisingly negative. It’s also closer to the truth than any of us would probably care to admit.